I'm being faithful to nothing,
to a memory,
to the ghost of what we never had.
But letting someone else sleep under these sheets,
hold me like you did,
feels like betrayal.
So I rather go to bed alone,
       cover my body with your shirt,
                and if I try hard enough I can still smell you in it,
than let anyone else erase with their touch the prints of your hands.

I saw you fall asleep
amidst a garden of stars,
underneath a moon
that if I looked closer,
would realise was just
as bright as your eyes,
and I found my favourite
constellation running
across your collarbones
and down along your chest,
and somewhere in between
all of that,
it collided with planets
that would never have
looked so beautiful
if I had seen them on someone else.
When I looked at you,
I found myself wondering
how a person could look
like that,
like they were the galaxy,
a galaxy so pretty that
for a moment,
the air left my lungs.

An oasis in a parched terrain
A rhyme in a dull refrain
In a storm a place to hide
A ******* in a riptide.

Going down, a parachute
Monday morning, short commute.
Summer day a scarf of silk
Warm cookies, a glass of milk.

Chocolate sundae the cherry on top,
Dangerous street a friendly cop.
A sturdy rope down the abyss
Tucked in bed a goodnight kiss.

I wanted to write a poem about flowers, so that's what I did.
It was short, expressed how I feel, and cut like glass.
I showed my father "Flowers" and he thought it was mediocre.
And I said, "No, "Mediocre" is the poem where I talk about dying,
and I'm trying to stay alive, so I wrote about flowers."

Flowers strangling soil plots with their roots, with their existence.
And to hurt something you love with your existence is a terrible feeling.

i bet even after all this time
that if my chest were to
ache with emptiness enough
like it used to i could go to your house
and find the outline of our bodies
on your dark blue bed sheets
i have spent the last year
both trying to run from you
and find you at the same time
but i left everything i knew
about falling in love
on that mattress and
it's still settling there
like dust and
all i can do is write about you
until it comes back to me,
or by some kind of miracle,
you decide to.